Welcome to the Pastel blog—a space dedicated to helping small businesses thrive. We're so excited to have you join us on this journey as we dish out tips, tricks, and insights to make your business the most successful and efficient it can be. Running a local business can be overwhelming, discouraging, and lonely. We know because we’ve been there. Our goal is to be your trusted guide you can navigate the twists and turns with confidence.
We’re small business owners, too
First, allow us to introduce ourselves. We're Amanda, Ted, and Anh, and we’ve experienced firsthand the challenges of operating a small business while running a local delivery service in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ted and Amanda are also the proud owners of San Francisco cake shop Butter&, which has 140,000 followers on Instagram. In our quest to provide top-notch customer service at both of those businesses, we found ourselves spending hours every day juggling customer support across email, text, phone calls, and social media. We wanted to go above and beyond for our customers, but we needed a way to do so efficiently so we wouldn’t burn out. That's when we realized that the tool we wished we had didn't exist yet. So, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. That’s how Pastel came to be.
"Customer support so simple a potato could do it"
Pastel is your secret weapon for boosting efficiency while delivering exceptional customer service. It's like having a personal assistant, but without the hefty paycheck. With Pastel, we unite all your communication channels into one convenient place, making it easy to manage your messages. Pastel also auto-drafts all your messages for you based on what you've written before—saving you valuable time and energy. We're all about making your life easier, which is why we encourage your customers to reach out via text rather than tying up your phone line with calls. And if you have a team in the trenches with you, Pastel makes it super simple to share multiple inboxes with them. To put it simply, our goal is to make providing great customer support so simple that a potato could do it (hence, the potato images everywhere)—so you and your team can work on more strategic projects (or take more strategic naps).
How to run a high-performance small business
Our mission is to make running a successful small business less overwhelming. On this blog, we’ll be sharing advice and insights to help you do so. We don’t have all the answers, but we have a great network of successful small business owners who will help out by sharing their expertise. We believe that every small business has a superpower: some are great at PR and constantly in the news, others use social media authentically to grow their businesses, others are skilled chefs with delicious products, some are process and efficiency whizzes, and so on. If we all collectively share our superpowers with each other, we can be so much stronger. So consider us your go-to resource for learning faster, avoiding painful learning experiences, and reducing overwhelm. You’re not alone on this journey.
Reach out and say hi!
If you have any specific questions you’d love for us to cover on this blog, maybe issues you’ve been dealing with at your small business and need some help navigating, please reach out! Or if you’d like to say hi, that’s awesome, too. You can always reach us at hi@trypastel.com.
